Predicting Someone's Future

I read everything by everyone, but what I let be positively influential in my life is a different story. If you want to know where people will be in their theological and ethical thinking five years down the line, you don't look at what they say now, but what group of people they're reading and hanging around. As it is said that "bad company corrupts good morals," so it is that a man's fondness of a particular trajectory of literature, a particular church, a particular social group acts as a crystal ball into his future. Our sin nature latches onto rebellion like Venom on Spiderman. In fact, one drifts away merely by no longer being influenced by orthodoxy, much less being influenced by the unorthodox. Though he be a faithful orthodox Christian today, he will be a blasphemer of that tradition tomorrow if his influences are blasphemers of it today. That's just the nature of the beast.